Fedellos do Couto - Peixe de Estrada, Galicia, Spain (2020)

TASTING NOTES

Amazing freshness on the nose along with black fruits, sour black cherries, and a touch peppery, iron and game. A precise, streamlined acidity drives the wine forward with vibrancy. 

Several small plots of 60-80-year-old vines planted to a wide range of varieties indigenous to this part of Galicia, located just south of Ribeira Sacra and Valdeorras. The Peixes wines are grown and made higher up in Bibei, where the soils are infused with a unique type of granite called mica. 

Whole bunch and indigenous yeast fermentation. 60% of the wine matured in used 500-liter French oak barrels and the rest in stainless steel for one year.

Fedellos loosely translates as "Brats", and Couto refers to the 12th century manor in Ribeira Sacra at the heart of the vineyards.

It's a young project, started in 2013 by Luis Taboada (whose family has owned the Couto manor for generations), and winemakers Curro Barreño and Jesús Olivares.

They lease 4 hectares of vineyards which are farmed organically and worked by hand - you couldn't do otherwise on these steep terraces! The vines are planted on terraces along the steep slopes of the rivers Sil and Bibei, with a myriad of grape varieties, altitudes, and expositions.

The wines are fermented with indigenous yeasts and whole bunches, at low temperatures to favour a gentle extraction of colour and phenolics. All the wines share an Atlantic freshness and a slatey minerality that make these wines unmistakably Galician